Adding a CAPTCHA to initial landing page for membership

I'm not an IT expert, so I don't know if the following proposal is feasible or practical, but would adding a CAPTCHA to the initial landing page on LT, which allows you to sign up to become a member, reduce the amount of bot-created spam the site has been swamped with recently? I'm sure no one would mind the additional seconds it takes to complete the sign-up process.

That verification page is no longer active; I don't want to create an account just to see whether account creation still pops this up.

It's a much better idea than a traditional captcha, though. Software is as good as people at cracking the character-recognition types by now. Image-recognition ("click on all images containing a dog") types probably have a year or two left.

Yeah, we have one, unfortunately. The spammers are not automating it, I don't think. But there are low-wage people who do this kind of work for a living.

What parts of the site have you seen a lot of spam on recently? Talk or Wiki or what?

>4 timspalding: Spam topics in the "Book Talk" group, mostly

I'm not sure how much this would filter spammers out, or if it would be a big pain for folks who don't want to add email addresses to their accounts (although it would certainly help with locked-out accounts) but...with account creation, could we require they enable their account with a link sent via email? Is that even helpful?

>6 kristilabrie: The only thing Captchas actually do is make it harder for people to use a site. There are groups DEDICATED in the spammer world to just handling them. If I'd had to deal with one when I first signed up, it probably would have kept me from joining. My original need was just to catalog the remaining books that I was putting into storage. I fell in love after a few weeks, and stayed.

Please please please do not use Captchas. :-{

I'm wondering if that was because we've had more, or because the db was behind and not killing them faster.

Loranne and Kristi—have we had more?

The only thing Captchas actually do is make it harder for people to use a site.

We already have a captcha on entry. We aren't going to add one for every Talk posting, or something.

T

Okay, I'll get Loranne on looking at patterns tomorrow--for example, whether they're using more people or just posting more.

Looks like there has been a new member refinement? Followed a Spam post back to the profile and saw this message:

Member: jasminenony

Unconfirmed member.

If you are this member, please check your email for confirmation directions, or email infolibrarything.com

Yeah. Certain actions that pretty much only spam accounts do send people into the unconfirmed category. Most spammers don't click on the link, so it's a win.